Leaving law behind to teach high school

I was looking to see what Mark J. Welch was up to when I came across a surprise. In the mid-1990s, Mark founded the California Estate Planning, Probate and Trust Law Web site. It was a pretty good site with a great collection of celebrities’ wills. He later sold the site to another law firm. (The site now appears to be dead.) From 1997 to 2002, Mark worked as a consultant focusing on Internet marketing. He also founded and later sold Adbility.com, an annotated directory of Internet advertising and affiliate marketing programs. Early in his career, Mark co-wrote the Law Office Technology Review column with Barry D. Bayer, who continues to write the column still. At the time, I was editor-in-chief of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly and a subscriber to the column.

So what is Mark’s latest venture? English teacher. As he reports on his personal site: “As of August 28, 2003, I am an English teacher at Oakland High School, in Oakland, California. Over the past year, I’ve spent almost all my time thinking about whether I should change careers (again) and become a secondary English teacher. During the 2002-2003 school year, I worked as a substitute teacher in Pleasanton. On my second morning working as a substitute teacher, a student said, ‘you’re smiling all the time .’ I kept smiling (inside and out) most of the year. If teaching can make me feel this wonderful, then I am headed in the right direction.”